I\u2019ve noticed that it is a universal desire among writers to sound good. I mean, think about it: your reader can\u2019t see your face, can\u2019t hear your voice, and probably doesn\u2019t know you. Your words are all you have to prove that you know something or have a great idea. And so it\u2019s only natural to want your writing to sound as smart and eloquent as an article from a scholarly journal or as brilliant and witty as an award-winning novel. How are people gonna believe you otherwise?<\/p>\n
The truth is, you don\u2019t have to sound smart or eloquent or brilliant or witty in order to write well. You just need to write clearly. Even if your writing comes out a little plain, it\u2019s better to sound plain and have your readers understand you than it is to try too hard to sound like all the great writers and not make any sense at all. Besides, plain writing isn\u2019t bad writing. If you\u2019re writing an argumentative essay, you\u2019ll probably want to use plain, clear writing, because if your readers can\u2019t understand you, they won\u2019t agree with you. Even if you\u2019re writing a novel or short story, where people usually experiment with different writing styles, your goal is still to tell a story. <\/em>If your readers don\u2019t know what\u2019s going on, they\u2019re probably not gonna like that story.<\/p>\n The problem when writers focus on sounding<\/em> a certain way is that they tend to focus on individual words and phrases rather than on the points they\u2019re trying to make. And if you\u2019re more focused on sounding like a famous writer or scholar, you end up writing bloated or inverted sentences that your readers get lost in. This isn\u2019t just a new writer thing\u2014I\u2019ve been writing for almost 15 years, and I still have to remind myself not to worry about sounding smart or witty until my writing is clear and easy to understand.<\/p>\n Let\u2019s say I\u2019m writing a short paper on Maine Coon cats (I have two of them. Best cats ever), and I want to talk about how they got their name, I could say<\/p>\n \u201cThought to have received their origins in the state of Maine, Maine Coon cats acquired their name that they are now recognized by years later, and the second part came from their supposedly being descended from the breeding of wild cats and raccoons, as people believed, but despite that it is now debunked, people still call them by this name.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n Or, I could just say<\/p>\n \u201cMaine Coons got their name because they originated in Maine and because of the myth that they came from the interbreeding of wild cats and raccoons.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n At first glance, Sentence #1 might look <\/em>more eloquent, when in reality, I\u2019m just cushioning two simple statements with extra words and phrases. I may have worked in some \u201cbetter\u201d verbs like received, acquired, recognized, <\/em>but I didn\u2019t actually need them to get my point across. Instead of being informative, Sentence #1 is cluttered and wordy, and my readers might have to read it two or three times to even know what I\u2019m talking about. Sentence #2 is plain, simple, and maybe a bit choppy, but it makes sense. <\/em>I could go back and smooth it out, but I don\u2019t need to add more words or make it sound big or profound for it to be \u201cgood.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I\u2019ve noticed that it is a universal desire among writers to sound good. I mean, think about it: your reader can\u2019t see your face, can\u2019t hear your voice, and probably doesn\u2019t know you. Your words are all you have to prove that you know something or have a great idea. And so it\u2019s only natural […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":250,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-554","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/250"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=554"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":557,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/554\/revisions\/557"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=554"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=554"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.umflint.edu\/writingcenter\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=554"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}